


Damnatio Memoriae

by Fallowsthorn



Category: Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Amnesia, Depiction of Triggers, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Triggers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallowsthorn/pseuds/Fallowsthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Clu didn't just filter Tron's memories away from what Rinzler could access - he deleted them entirely." A confused post-Legacy Rinzler wakes up in the Outlands and must find some way to balance his returning directives with everything Clu made him do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Silentium Aurum Est

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the Tron Kink Meme, and the summary is more or less taken from there, too. Also, I know that my Latin is probably terrible, because, big shock, I don't actually know any Latin. I can make educated guesses about Google Translate. That's pretty much it. It's for effect. "Damnatio memoriae," on the other hand, is a real thing that did exist. And now you know.

The world was darkness.

A circuit flickered sluggishly, light refraction giving it a distorted line down the figure’s body.

Light?

The Sea surrounded him, bore him up, held him down, kept him. _Wake,_ it said.

He woke. He did not move. His eyes did not open. His circuits did not brighten or dim. He had been trained too well to make any sign of consciousness in an unfamiliar environment.

Trained?

Who was he?

He was-

He was-

He felt his processor glitch on the question. It shouldn’t do that. The question was too basic. He was- was- was- was- was....

Fine, then. What was he?

A basic. A - he was-

Users delete it, he couldn’t even get his own function.

Wait. Users. He was - not a User. Something in him recoiled at that - that he could even suppose that for an instant. Users.

Users were everything.

No! Users were nothing! A voice came back to him, telling him that, in so many tones and ways, but always, always the same voice. _Users are nothing! They are worse than useless! They are-_

_-imperfections._

He caught that voice and held it and turned it over in his head, analyzing it. Who did that voice belong to?

He’d learned from the last questions and did not ask his memory this time for a name. He asked it simply for the feeling that voice was connected with, and that was given to him readily.

_Safe._

He opened his eyes at last to discover that it didn’t really make a difference in what he saw. What name did that voice call him?

Rinzler.

And yet - it felt wrong. That was not him. But it was the only name he had, and it was still no clue as to his function, his identity.

Rinzler. Huh. What did he do?

Rinzler tried to access his most recent memories and found he couldn’t. He rolled his eyes and just grabbed the first memory he could.

No.

No.

Users, no.

He reeled away from an imaginary enemy, but the scene followed him. Programs, scared and running and screaming and derezzing and that was _him_ , he had done _that-_!

Who was he? What was he?

And the core of him answered:

**I am Rinzler. I fight.**

And the core of him answered:

_I cannot, if that is what I fight for._

The figure held in the dark spasmed, once. It opened its mouth and took a breath and the Sea rushed inside to engulf him.


	2. Mundus Vult Decipi

The world was not dark.

The Sea bore him up, and up, and up, and because he was a part of It now, It slammed him against the broken-glass shore. Because he could never be wholly a part of It, It left him there.

The figure’s circuits pulsed weakly. Red. Blue. Off. Red. Blue. Off. Red. Off. Off. Blue. Off. Off. Red.... Off. Red. Off. Blue. Off. Off.

Red.

Off....

* * *

 It was a long time before the figure moved. Not that anything would know; the land was barren and empty, and the figure could not be expected to really have its internal chronometer working right.

The figure convulsed and tried to reboot, which didn’t work out so well. Instead, he ended up on all fours, spewing what felt like the entire Sea onto the ground. The Sea, unhappy with such a small vessel, swarmed away to join the rest of Itself, leaving the figure to get his bearings.

Rinzler groaned and sank back on his haunches, swaying slightly. He felt waterlogged and sick. His head was pounding from more than the surf. His throat was raw, the code there running hot. He let a hand stray towards it as he catalogued his surroundings and ran a diagnostic.

He was sitting on the shoreline. There wasn’t really much else to say about it; there was only one shoreline on the Grid. The Sea was to his left, the City to his right. Hmm. The City. It had a longer name than that, didn’t it? He couldn’t remember....

Oh well. Maybe it would come back to him. Rinzler opened up the diagnostic and scanned it quickly. It didn’t tell him anything new: he was waterlogged, his head was pounding, and the code in his throat had been torn away and corrupted.

Wait, what?

Reflexively, Rinzler tried to look at the wound, and discovered that he had a helmet when it rezzed over his face, triggered by the action. He found out why when the pain in his throat disappeared, and various statistics and information started to scroll on the inside of the glass. Well, that was handy. Apparently with his current resources (nil) and level of energy (also basically nil, although he was regaining some just by sitting there), he would be able to walk to the City. Barely.

Rinzler stood carefully and walked a few steps to make sure he could. A little shaky at little, but he got stronger, his steps more sure, as he continued away from the Sea. He didn’t know what he was, yet, what had happened to make him like this, but as he recovered more fully from the forced shut-down, bits and pieces were starting to come back to him. He didn’t know, either, why he should go to the City, why he felt an inexplicable draw to it, what he would do when he got there. He could cross that bridge when he came to it.

Rinzler stopped, tilting his head. Why had he thought that? It had the ring of a retrieved set of data to it, like those words were always supposed to go in that order and with that meaning. And they didn’t even make any sense. The City wasn’t protected by any bridges. Half of it was separated from the Outlands by a chasm, but the other half was firmly anchored to the ground.

He gave it up as another mystery and refocused on the distant gleam of the City. The City. It had a name... no, it was someone’s name, the City had been named after....

“Tron,” he said, unthinking. He immediately regretting it when the code in his throat lashed out at being asked to synthesize a voice for him, and sent arcs of pain into his neck and chest. The sound he made was along the lines of a glitching data-reader program, all crunch and whir. Okay. So that was a bad idea. Rinzler paused to let the pain die away before starting to walk again. He had no energy to waste.

Tron City, then. Huh. Rinzler idly wondered what this Tron program had done, who he had been, that he got to have a whole city named after him.


	3. Initium Est Dimidium Facti

Rinzler, once he’d reached a long stretch of the Outlands that didn’t require him to concentrate on his balance, let his mind wander. What did he know, so far?

He knew that he was hurt, but that the helmet helped with it. So he must have had the injury before he’d ended up in the Sea, so it probably wasn’t going to corrupt him further or derezz him before he could get it looked at by... someone.

He should know who that was, shouldn’t he?

He knew that he had to get to the City, and then to the Arena. He didn’t know why, or what he would find there, but one of his base directive was that if he was alone without orders, he should make his way there. That thought led naturally into: who would have given him the orders? And what orders would he have given?

Unbidden, a memory rose up. Gold circuits, the Arena, blue-white circuits, programs derezzing-

But they weren’t programs. Programs were part of a perfect system, and these... they... the, the, the....

What _were_ they?

And why had he derezzed them?

Rinzler left the memory alone. So far, once he did that, the answer had shown up connected to something else, later. Instead, he went back to thinking of what he already knew.

He knew his name. He was Rinzler.

It was strange - there was a sense of wrongness, of something missing, when he confirmed that. But there was nothing to back that up. He didn’t remember anything other than that name - wait.

There was -

\- something -

A memory. Right before he’d ended up in the Sea. He was missing something, he knew that, Effect Follows Cause and so there must be something to Cause his fall, but -

\- he couldn’t _find_ it -

And that was it. That memory was the only one he was missing in its entirety. The others, he might only have bits and pieces, but he _had_ them, he could remember derezzing the not-programs even if he couldn’t remember why, he remember the Safe voice and the circuits but not the name -

He knew his own name but not his function.

He didn’t know what his own purpose was.

With a start, Rinzler realized he was growling. He hadn’t noticed before because it didn’t hurt - the sound file was low enough and quiet enough that it didn’t stress his throat. The sound stuttered and ground to a halt once he noticed it. Hmm. It didn’t seem that hard to replicate....

Rinzler searched for the file, ignoring the faint twinges from his throat as it warned him against making too much noise. Eventually he found something that sounded sort of like it, but... not quite. The sound was smoother than a growl, less harsh, and he discovered that it took almost no energy to keep going. It was a comforting sound in the silence of the Outlands, so he let it continue as he walked.

And he remembered.

He remembered a hand at his disc, yellow hand white hands same _no_

That way led to a loop of half-formed memory, and Rinzler terminated the thought before it could get that far.

He remembered a hand on his back, then. Somehow he knew the circuits had been gold, there was no conflict there. But why had he thought of white circuits in conjunction with them? Who or what were those white circuits a part of? They were the wrong color for the Safe voice....

Rinzler searched his memory for those same white-circuited hands, and came up with nothing except, again, the nagging sense that - wait.

It wasn’t nothing. Well, yes, there was still the sense that something else should be there, but there was a more recent memory connected to those hands. He’d fought the unknown program, the User, in Disc Wars and he hadn’t been able to derezz him. But no, that wasn’t it. That memory was perfectly clear, without the vague quality some of them held.

Rinzler asked his memory, since he wasn’t going to get a name, what feeling these hands were connected to.

His memory said, _Hurt._

Oh. So this program - no. Not a program. Not one of the Others, either, whatever they were. That left...

_hurt_

_stop_

_hurt_

Rinzler forced himself to complete the thought. He connected those white circuits with hurt. He wasn’t sure of the reason for it, but there it was, sitting in the center of his chest. And that meant he connected hurt with a User.

He shook his head violently. No, that couldn’t be right. Users were - were - were

_I fight-_

_I serve-_

_hurt_

_stop_

_alone_

Rinzler found himself on his hands and knees, wheezing harshly. His throat made a digital whine every time he took a breath. _Alone._ He seized on the feeling, pushed at it. He was hurt, and alone, and the User had -

_He was hurt and alone and his User had abandoned him. He could not remember his User’s name - he could not remember his own name - he could not remember-_

_A gold-lighted hand reached into his vision, and he looked up into an unfamiliar face. “I’m sorry,” said -_

\- said the Safe voice - 

_\- said the gold program. “You must be very confused. Do you remember what happened?”_

_He remembered - white hands - gold hands - waking up. He shook his head._

_“Your name? Your function?”_

_Again, no._

He was - was - was - was

_He was a blank slate, as far as he knew. But he was hurt, and alone, and... he didn’t really know why. The gold program nodded. “You are Rinzler. You fight.”_

_Rinzler nodded dumbly. They were a name and a function, and he supposed they were his, but... they didn’t feel all the way right. As though pieces of him were sticking out past the parameters he’d been given._

_“Do you know who I am?”_

He was Safe. He - he was gold hands and barked orders and builder and Safe.

_Rinzler nodded, slowly. “You are the Administrator,” he rasped. His throat pinged all kinds of warnings to him, and it hurt, but he had been asked a question and he must answer. “I fight for you.”_

I fight for - he fought - no - no! It was wrong somehow but - 

There was nothing to contradict it. No logical reason to think that there was something wrong. Just that one missing memory.

Rinzler curled up on his side in the middle of the Outlands plains. He stayed that way for a long time.


	4. Ciuitatem Peccati

Rinzler, once he’d made it back to his feet, walked at a steady pace towards the City. He didn’t dwell on his missing memories any more than superficially, not wanting to lose even more time in the middle of the Outlands; instead, he let a background process run to retrieve memory sets so he could review them later.

By the time he’d reached the City - didn’t it have a longer name than that? He couldn’t remember - Rinzler had filled in most of the past thousand cycles, from his first running to the present time. He’d learned, first and foremost, that the Safe voice had a name; that his name was Clu. That it was an honor -

He felt his grip on the present start to fragment, and staggered, bracing himself on a nearby rock. Rinzler pushed at that sentence, tried desperately to finish it without retrieving the whole memory. That he’d stood by Clu, knowing it was an honor to -

_He stood by Clu, watching the Rectified basics fight in the Arena. They were barely more than byte code, much less sophisticated than Rinzler. It was an honor to be the only program coded from scratch by Clu, and both of them knew it. It was why Rinzler didn’t -_

\- fight for the -

_\- fight the random User-worshipping programs that occasionally attacked them; he knew that eventually they would be Rectified. It was also why Clu didn’t create any other programs. Rinzler was his best fighter; why would he need another one?_

Rinzler found himself kneeling, leaning against the rock for balance. That one hadn’t been as bad as the others, and not nearly as bad as the first. When his breathing was back under control, he got to his feet and continued. The rough Outlands floor had given way to the hexmap pavement of the City.

It did have a longer name, didn’t it? It was named after someone, some program....

Rinzler shrugged. Maybe it would come back to him. For now, the area around him was deserted; the only circuits in sight were the ones on the sides of buildings, decorative and functional alike. He looked down at himself, faintly surprised to discover that his circuits were red. That seemed strange for some reason; first that they were red, and second that he was surprised. Of course they would be red. They’d always been red. Why would they be any other color?

Rinzler shook his head in frustration. This was getting him nowhere, both figuratively and literally. He needed to get out of the street and make it to the Arena. It was both the center of the City, and, Rinzler had learned, the center of operations for Clu. He would find answers there, whether he liked them or not.

He scaled the nearest building quickly, and jumped from rooftop to rooftop as quickly as he could. The Arena stood as a beacon, above everything else, gleaming and clean. He paused for a moment, turning to look back at the Sea, and then stopped, and stared.

A bright light blazed in the distance. The Portal. The _Users_. Where was Clu? The Portal was open. Rinzler remembered flying towards it in pursuit. Where was -

_A kick to his chest, a collision -_

Automatically, Rinzler put a hand to his chest. That - that hadn’t been like the others. That was _recent_. It wasn’t retrieved, hadn’t been written to disc. He _felt_ it.

Where was Clu?

Rinzler stared at the blinding light - there were no clouds around it. What had happened?

The Portal gave him no answers. After a while he turned away from it, and continued until he reached the Arena.


	5. Stulti Ruunt In

The Arena looked strange. Rinzler was used to the stands pulsing with cheering programs, and he hadn’t realized just how much he was used to it until he was standing on the roof, staring down at empty space. It was disconcerting, almost.

It was also handy, because it meant he could speak with Clu - Clu had to be here, that was what his orders said - in relative peace. Rinzler leapt down on the tops of the Disc Wars boxes, then paused before he jumped to the Arena floor. He wasn’t alone. He crouched as low as he could on the edge of the compartment, listening.

“...and from what I can tell of the notes Dad left, there’s gonna be a lot of gridbug attacks coming from over that way-”

He knew that voice.

_I’m not a program! My name -_

_**User** _

_\- is Sam Flynn!_

Rinzler shook his head to clear it. So the User was still here. Easily resolved, said most of his code. Help him, said the rest.

He ended the dilemma by realizing that SamFlynn was speaking to someone, and that he should find out who. He crouched lower on the box and watched as three programs - no, one program, two Users - walked onto the Arena floor, talking amongst themselves.

“So we’ll deal with them when they show up, Sam, we’ve got more important things to worry about,” said the other User, and Rinzler nearly jumped to the floor right then, blinded and swamped by **_Mine_** echoing from the deep parts of his code.

_**Mine, mine. My User.** _

Rinzler swayed, catching himself from moving forward. That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. He didn’t have a User - Clu was the one who’d written him, proof of the Users’ tyranny, that they did not want to allow it. And yet. And yet.

_**Mine.** _

His chest felt tight, a compression just below where his disc should be. This wasn’t right. That voice, that need, clashed with everything he’d ever known. His helmet threw warnings in front of his face. He wasn’t breathing. He would overheat if he didn't keep breathing. He was digging his fingers so tightly into the glass that the code on the end of them was giving way.

_You have no User. You are a truly perfect -_

_**Mine!** _

Rinzler fought to take a breath. Then another. Slowly, he clawed his way back to the present, forced himself to see and hear what was actually happening. Shoved away the desperate desire to jump to the Arena floor and - derezz the User - fight for the - stop.

Stop.

Focus.

Rinzler’s breath whirred against the broken code in his throat. Focus. Gather intel. Find Clu. Clu would fix everything. He was Safe, he knew what had happened and he would know how to fix it. He had to.

Focus.

The group below him was still talking. The program spoke next, and something about him seemed so familiar... almost like Rinzler had met him before, but just couldn’t find the right memory file to access.

“Alan_1. Do you want me to prepare for these gridbugs? I have to admit, I’m not sure what I can do here. The Grid isn’t connected to any other system.”

Alan_1 - and Rinzler caught himself again, held himself still - shook his head and opened his mouth, but SamFlynn spoke first. “It could be. We’re working on it. But Tron, man-”

Rinzler had no idea what he said after that. That one word slammed into him, and he froze.

_Tron_

Memory engulfed him and he drowned in it.

_I fight for the Users!_

_\- a kick to his chest, a collision -_

_I fight -_

_**Tron** _

_Tron_

_**what have you become?** _

No. No. He was still missing something. There was still - he couldn’t think. Fragments of memory sliced into his code, plunged him from red to blue to dead black.

_**Tron** _

_what have you done?_

_**what have you become?** _

Rinzler fell.


	6. Similus Trahit Simile

The world was darkness.

He woke. He did not move. His eyes did not open. His circuits did not brighten or dim. He had been too well trained to make any sign of awareness around a potential threat.

Trained?

What was he?

He was - was-

Rinzler woke, and took a breath without meaning to. He opened his eyes to find that he was lying in one of the gamer cells, where video game conscripts were held if there weren’t enough combatants to fill all the tournament slots immediately. In the later cycles they’d usually found the 15 programs needed quickly enough; but earlier on there hadn’t been as many… recruits.

What had happened? He’d made it to the Arena. The next obvious step was meeting Clu, but hadn’t been-

_-a kick to his chest-_

Rinzler flinched away from that, and kept going. He’d found… two Users, one a known entity and the other ( **mine** )-

_-unfamiliar._

And then he’d lost control and fallen to the Arena floor. That much was obvious; he didn’t have his helmet on, and his shoulder and hip hurt where he’d fallen on them. But - that didn’t make sense. Why had he fallen?

Why did it feel like something was missing?

Rinzler frowned, poking at his memory cache. Why had he fallen? He should remember this. It was recent, the system clock said he’d been out for a half-millicycle, no more. He wasn’t glitching - he didn’t think he was glitching.

Why had he fallen?

_bright light trails, then a rise **Tron, what have you become?**_

Rinzler’s head pounded violently, and he aborted the process in favor of clutching it in his hands. The helmet rezzing helped, but not as much as he would’ve liked it to. His chest still hurt.

Focus. Focus.

So that had been the part he couldn’t remember. The light trails confirmed that, it had been during the aerial battle with - on the way to-

He stopped, weary from pushing at the same wound over and over. He still didn’t know why he’d fallen, or why he was here.

Rinzler took a deep breath, then look up sharply as the force field blocking the doorway shut down with a quiet snap. The User from before, the one he’d fought in the Arena and in the air, stepped through.

He was holding a disc.

For an instant, Rinzler thought it was the User’s disc, that he had come to derezz Rinzler, and his eyes widened behind his helmet. Then he looked again, and saw that the disc was a flat, useless white. A blank, then, probably pilfered from the Sirens’ room below.

He looked up at the User’s face, and couldn’t stop himself from shifting as though to stand, and curling one hand into a fist. That purring sound that he hadn’t realized he was making intensified, filling the room.

The User - _SamFlynn,_ said something faint and strange - held his hands up, palms toward Rinzler. “Whoa, whoa, hang on. We found you on the floor of the Arena. I’m not gonna hurt you, okay? I mean, unless you go all psychotic on me or something.”

Rinzler blinked, but for some reason - focus - a User not making sense was a familiar sensation. But why? The most contact he’d had with a User before this was fighting one.

_-a rise, a collision, a kick to-_

He shook his head sharply. Focus. That had to wait.

SamFlynn took that as an answer to what he was saying, and laughed awkwardly. “Uh, okay, that’s… good? Okay then.”

When Rinzler stared at him expectantly, he kept going.

“So, uh, we don’t actually know what’s going on with you, so we figured that we’d keep you here just in case, like, I dunno.” He took a breath, then let it out, too quickly for it to have done him much good. “You… you’re really obviously not just Henchman #5. We don’t know how much of you is… what Clu did and how much is… how much isn’t. That. But we can write it!” SamFlynn grabbed at his own subject change frantically. He was nervous. Rinzler tilted his head, wishing the User would get to the point already.

SamFlynn held up the blank disc. “If you’ll let me copy your code as it is to this, then Alan and I can take a look at it, and see what’s left over from the original and what’s from Clu, and if we can get rid of the new stuff without totally corrupting you, ‘kay?”

Rinzler’s head and throat pulsed unpleasantly at the mention of Alan - _Alan_1_ , said the faint strange thing - but he covered that well enough. It was the distinction after that that worried him.

SamFlynn spoke of Clu as though he wasn’t Rinzler’s original creator. That didn’t fit with what Rinzler knew of the world. The most likely solution was that the User was lying or wrong - after all, the only other User he’d know had done both regularly. But even if most of what he was saying was false, the obvious question remained: what was this original meant to be? And why was Rinzler so obviously expected to recognize it?

There weren’t many options available to him. He was prisoner, whether he could take advantage of that or not; and of those few options, only one led to the answers that he couldn’t puzzle out on his own. And he could rule out the likelihood of a virus on the disc - only empty ones could hold that flat white color, and disc color wasn’t as easy to change as circuit pattern, especially not one’s own.

The User was expecting an answer, and a quick look at the numbers on the right of Rinzler’s HUD told him that speaking would hurt just as much as it had in the Outlands and the-

_User, **what have you** done?_

the Arena.

Rinzler grimaced and took a deep, whirring breath. “User,” he said, to make sure he had SamFlynn’s attention. He didn’t want to repeat himself.

SamFlynn almost dropped the disc in surprise. Rinzler ignored the fumble and stood, turning his back to give the User access to his empty disc slot and trying to force down how _wrong_ this felt. He spat out, “Yes,” only half-articulating it to save his throat from the harsh syllabant.

Then he shut his eyes and focused on breathing as the blank disc clattered against his back. He kept trying to convince his code that this was Clu, this was Safe, it was the routine bug check they ran every cycle. It wasn’t working. SamFlynn was too inexperienced; it took him just a moment too long to line up the catch.

Rinzler couldn’t forget that image of white hands-

_-white hands, gold hands-_

_-hurt-_

He dug his fingers into his palms and stood still.

When SamFlynn held the disc in his hands again, it was light blue and orange. Why hadn’t he ever thought about that before? Why wasn’t it all one color or the other, like other programs? Rinzler blinked and shook his head. Why was he thinking about something so inane, would be a better question.

Focus.

SamFlynn had put the disc away somewhere, out of sight, and he stood there awkwardly, clasping his hands. “There’s… that’s not everything. Um… do you remember what happened? Any of it?”

_white hands - waking up-_

Rinzler shook his head again, then held up a hand before SamFlynn could take that as his answer. With an effort, he said, “The fight. Falling. The… Sea. Where is-” His throat hurt too much to continue, and he gave up.

SamFlynn nodded. “Okay. Well, Alan’s-” (and the heat and pain in Rinzler’s throat felt like it would crawl out of his mouth) “-pretty sure that if we let you wander around in the Outlands, you can find your discs on your own. They’re on the same wavelength or something, I dunno. But the other thing is….” He trailed off, appearing to steel himself. “D- I mean, Flynn was… derezzed. He reintegrated with Clu to save the rest of the Grid. Neither of them survived. If you’re really who he thought you were… I’m sorry.”

Rinzler ignored the last sentence. All of his attention was taken up with the news that Clu was… gone.

Derezzed.

Strangely, the information wasn’t affecting him the way other discoveries had. Rinzler simply did not know what to do. He had no action set for this event. The only thing he could think was that if he couldn’t find Clu, he was to go to the Arena. He couldn’t find Clu. He was at the Arena, but - and that led to a logic loop that Rinzler wasn’t sure he’d be able to get out of.

The snap of the force field reforming made Rinzler look up. The User had left, unable to get a further response. Again Rinzler thought of the possibility of him lying; and again he had to discard that explanation when he couldn’t think of a reason for it.  Even if the lie was simply to confuse him - Clue wouldn't let this happen. Clu was Safe. He was the Administrator.

 **I am Rinzler. I fight -** for what?

Rinzler sank down to the floor, and for the first time since dragging himself out of the Sea, did absolutely nothing.


	7. Nosce Inimicum Tuum

Movement.

Hmm?

A threat? No.

Rinzler woke sluggishly, blinking before processing what was happening. The hand waved through his vision again, and for a moment he defaulted to seeing gold circuits, before the real world reasserted itself.

He blinked, and shook his head, and took a breath to try and kickstart his processor. Only then did he look up at the User, who was standing off to the side, looking concerned despite himself.

Memory-

No. Focus.

“User,” he said, by way of greeting, and stood, glad for the interruption. He had scripts to deal with Users. Scripts without a true goal, but it was something to do. Analyze the threat, wait for it to talk.

SamFlynn was fidgeting with something that turned out, on closer examination, to be the copy of Rinzler’s disc. When Rinzler spoke, he looked up and offered it to the program. Rinzler just stared, and after a moment, the User dropped his hand, awkwardly.

“We’re standing in Tron City,” he said, experimentally.

Rinzler flinched on reflex, and glared, though the User probably couldn’t tell. He’d known the name of the city before just now, hadn’t he? It sounded at once like new information and something he’d known for a very long time. But that was impossible - and why would it sound so familiar? Why did it elicit such a reaction from him? His throat felt raw, had pulsed with heat at the name. And he hadn’t meant to move.

SamFlynn stared at him, eyes narrowed and head tilted. “What’s the first thing you remember?”

This time, Rinzler’s only reaction was to blink in confusion. Had the User caught some virus that was making him act so erratically? What was going on? Could Users even contract viruses?

Focus. What could he remember?

Clu was - dead. Somehow the User word softened the blow, made it less real. He still felt it like-

_a kick to the chest_

_lines of light and a rise-_

_**Tron, what-** _

_**I fight-!** _

No. Stop. Focus. Focus.

Breathe.

What could he remember?

Finding the Arena. A fall, but not to the Sea. Waking.

No, before that.

Overhearing three programs - no, a User and a program - no?

Two Users and -

\- and?

Rinzler gave up. One of those Users was in front of him, and the **other-**

One of the User-related scripts he was running warned him off that line of thinking. He couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of a User. Rinzler accepted that without bothering to examine it. He didn’t have the processing power to question his own code when it was trying to keep him safe.

SamFlynn - he could remember that name, at least - coughed. “Uh, never mind. Look, we figured out the main thing that’s going on with you. Well, the two things, actually, but we’re also pretty sure you’re not going to try and kill us all suddenly, so, uh. You don’t have to stay in here.”

Rinzler nodded, largely because the User seemed desperate for any sort of feedback. He kept quiet, though. Acknowledgement of speech was one thing; giving away information was another.

“So. What Clu did to you is… well, we’re not completely sure it’s irreversible. But he deleted a huge chunk of your memory, and the kicker is, he set it up to be constant. It wasn’t, like, one wipe and then he just let your memory accumulate again. There are scripts running to filter things out. Everything related to the word ‘Tron’-”

Rinzler shook his head involuntarily and coughed, making a harsh grating sound. He saw SamFlynn wince out in his peripheral vision and wondered if the pressure and pain against his throat felt or sounded worse.

Once SamFlynn was sure Rinzler wasn’t going to keel over (and what did that mean? Why - but that way lay redundancies and confusion), he continued. “Everything related to that is locked down as it happens, so you’re unable to access the memory. If your disc is synced, the memory or phrase or whatever is purged immediately, unless there are a few different keywords in it, in which case they’re kept in that locked mode so somebody, Clu I guess, can look them over.”

There the User paused again, to eye Rinzler warily and judge his reaction. Rinzler barely noticed this, caught in a loop of tautologies. He hadn’t known about anything like that. But Clu wouldn’t keep things from him. Clu was safe, was Creator and Administrator. (Except the Users said he wasn’t and now Clu was derezzed, his power was not absolute, a User had - the Users had bested him, were they the Administrators now? The winners write the history books but _that wasn’t his_ and he didn’t know what a book was.) But if Clu did not hide it and Rinzler did not know then-

“Liar,” Rinzler spat, surprising the User. Good. Catch him off guard. His throat hurt and he ignored it. “I remember-”

_The Sea._ **what have** _a kick to the chest_ **you become**

“No,” he said, and wanted to blame his throat for the uncertainty in his voice.

SamFlynn stared at him. “Where are we?” he asked. His voice sounded strange as well. Not wary and not fearful, but - Rinzler didn’t know the word for it. Not strong. Soft, but not threatening. Not normal.

A User had asked a question and it was innocuous enough that he was prompted to answer. “The Arena.”

“Where is that?” The User’s expression was strange now, too, matching his voice. Rinzler still couldn’t match it to a word or a memory.

“The City.”

“What’s the City called?”

Rinzler opened his mouth and stopped. The City had a name. He knew it. The User had said it, just now. As a test? As a trick? But he’d heard the name before, hadn’t he? Somewhere…. He reached for whatever he could, but all he found was the Sea. A kick to the chest, a collision. Coughing up water and tasting viruses instead of energy.

But what was the City called?

“No,” he said again, very quietly, suddenly wishing the User would go away. His throat hurt. And the City-

But if the User wasn’t lying, where did that leave him?

And if Clu had lied to him - if that was possible… what could Rinzler trust? If he couldn’t trust his own memory, even? The Users? This User? But he could lie, too. Users lied. It was a part of how they operated, too ingrained in them to patch or delete even if they’d had normal code.

But Clu had told him that. And he couldn’t remember when.

“The stress on the filter will add up,” SamFlynn said. Rinzler wanted to snap at him to speak up, be firmer. He didn’t know how to classify the User’s speech as it was. Instead, he just closed his eyes, and listened.

“The more it has to hold, the worse it’s going to get. We think we can help you find your discs, since there should be a sort of ‘homing beacon’ effect. I don’t really get how it works, but apparently it’s supposed to safeguard against stuff like this. The idea is if you wander around enough without a real goal, eventually you’ll find it, as vague as that sounds.”

He was right; that did sound like a User-implemented feature.

“The problem is, if you sync your discs without changing anything, they’ll just purge everything that’s marked to free up space. We think. Probably. It’s up to you, in the end, but if you do that, and you go nuts, you might wind up… dead.”

Translation: do what we want or derezz. Well, at least it wasn’t an unfamiliar directive.

“Those are pretty much your options, right now, since the disc we have is read-only so any chance of changing it is out. You can go out with us and find your discs, or you can sit here and… hope nothing else goes wrong, I guess. Whichever one you pick, though, it’s gonna have to happen soon.” Message delivered, the User fell silent.

Rinzler nodded to show he’d heard, and looked down at the floor to think. It wasn’t much of a choice, to be honest. It had never been in Rinzler’s code to take risks, wherever that code had come from. He couldn’t afford them in the Games and he couldn’t afford them on the Grid. Almost every algorithm he could put those choices through would tell him to wait, or even to take the read-only and buy himself more time, assuming that it was worth more than whatever he might lose. He’d survived for this long before those things had happened; clearly they weren’t vital.

But his throat hurt, and he couldn’t remember the name of the City.

Do what we want or derezz. He could cross that bridge when he came to it.

Enough.

Focus.

Rinzler looked up and started walking, not waiting for SamFlynn to realize where he was going and catch up. He knew the shortest way out of the Arena, and he knew how to reach the Outlands. He could remember that much, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do update. I update sporadically and inconsistently, but I do update. And now I know where this is going to go, and how it's going to end. Any of you who are reading this, thank you for being patient with me. I'll try my best to make it worth your while.


	8. Conquiesco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with a trigger warning for brief in-character contemplation of suicide (which isn't followed through on). If you would like to be spoiled, there is more information in the end notes.

It was a long while before they actually saw anything other than rock on one side and the Sea on the other. SamFlynn, once he’d realized what Rinzler was going to do, had run off to collect the other User and the program, both of whom were staying well enough back that Rinzler wasn’t falling apart every three steps. It was an incredibly unwieldy and unstable patch, but it had worked thus far, three eighths of a millicycle down the coast of the Outlands.

The actual process was very strange. If you had asked Rinzler what he was doing, which line of code or algorithm or check he was actually running, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It was a half-implemented feature, one that the User or Users who’d thought it up hadn’t fully realized and had almost certainly tried to code in the Grid rather than outside of it. Nonetheless, every time he closed his eyes and imagined the direction he should go to find his discs, there was just enough of a tug, just enough of a returned answer, that he recognized it as true.

When he found them, it was almost anticlimactic. A flash of blue and orange next to a rock, pulsing slowly in standby. Rinzler slowed to a stop near it, and waited SamFlynn caught up with him. It felt odd. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. He knew half of his code was operating as though nothing had changed from the last millicycle to this one, but since he was able to discount most of what it was suggesting he do, it couldn’t have been that. He’d known finding his discs wouldn’t provide an instant solution - he’d thought he’d known, at least.

SamFlynn picked up Rinzler's discs, snapping them into one unit.

“Uh... here.”

Rinzler took the discs slowly, almost reverently, then shook his head in near-amusement. They wouldn’t break. The automatic action was to dock them, let them sync, but he overrode it. He remembered.

Right? He remembered he couldn’t dock his discs. Why not? There was a reason. There was a reason, and he knew the reason. Something would happen. Something bad. There was... a filter? A name? The name of the City? What was the City called?

He gave up. Enough to know that he couldn’t do it. _Why_ could wait for later.

SamFlynn held out another disc: the read-only. Rinzler began to examine it, as much of a thanks and a dismissal as he could make it without speaking.

In his peripheral vision, he saw SamFlynn leave the immediate area, and go back to confer with... the other two, the User sitting on a rock where his feet were occasionally soaked by the Sea, the program staying carefully out of it. He could remember that they were a program and User; he could remember the User’s name, but it was easier not to process it.

And then he was alone. Good. It wasn’t a decision he wanted to make with a User breathing down his neck.

Again, the retrieved set of data. Not his. Rinzler growled, faintly. He was tired of thinking and doing things that weren’t his. He sat on a nearby rock, facing the Sea, and opened both sets of discs to look over the code.

Aside from being mostly similar, they were largely incomprehensible, due to his lack of related knowledge. He was able, however, to distinguish between the code from a User - it was still hard to think of it as “original” - the code from Clu, and two other oddities that didn’t fit in either category. The first was the defunct, broken jargon in harsh red, that he knew wasn’t proper code by any means, and there was a lot of that. Rinzler winced when he came to an incredibly long section that had to be the wound at his throat, and wished he could change it there and then.

Retrieved data. Delete the Users and delete Clu.

The thought shocked him. Both that he’d had it and that he was able to have it. He scrolled back randomly, as though he’d be able to find the line of code that had changed his attitude towards Clu from devotion to anger. Clu was Creator and Administrator. Clu was safe - but Clu had lied.

Code didn’t lie. Circuits couldn't lie, not for long, and Rinzler was staring at blue and gold and red in his own discs. No wonder the colors had never matched.

The second aberration came at the very bottom of the rest of his code, set apart by several lines. Notably, the letters themselves were greenish-black in color, visible only via a faint light blue outline, and the code was only present on the read-only disc. He’d picked it up sometime between the battle in the Outlands and arriving at the Arena... unless the Users had added it. He hadn’t seen them look over it, and he only had their word that the disc itself was read-only; he had no way of telling the difference. He squinted, but the code remained as illegible as ever.

What could he do? Dock his discs or get rid of the filter. One might lead to his deresolution; the other... he didn’t know what might happen. It involved giving a User access to his discs, though, and letting them change his code without knowing what they might really do. The odd code on the newer disc proved that the Users couldn’t be trusted That was a certainty. Derezzing, on the other hand, was just a possibility.

Rinzler stared down at his code, shut out every stimulus but the sound of the Sea, and closed his eyes to think.

* * *

He opened his eyes, decision made. He stood, still facing the Sea, and took a deep breath. He didn’t need to. More User remnants. This wouldn’t fix them, but - it was better than doing nothing. At least he wouldn’t notice them anymore.

He docked his discs. As the sync took hold, he felt peace and calm fill him. He had no questions, just three directives: get to the Arena. Find the Administrator. Destroy the Users.

A figure approached. White circuits. User. It said something. Didn’t matter what.

_I fight!_

_Finish the game!_

He got three steps toward the User before a disc slammed into him, shattering his arm and part of his side. He growled and turned to face this new opponent.

* * *

Rinzler shook his head. Not that, then. He tried again.

* * *

He stood and walked to SamFlynn. When the User looked confused, he silently handed him all three discs. The User nodded. “Gimme a minute.”

It was longer than two microcycles, but he eventually got his own discs back. He docked them, and peace flooded through him as he synchronized and reviewed the changes. Many places were the same, he noted, but the harsh red was almost all gone. He felt stronger, more centered, more powerful. He realized that he was proud of what the User had made him into. How could he not be? It was in his code.

* * *

Rinzler shook his head again, this time in disgust. Not that, either. But what? If he could be sure to survive, he would dock his discs as they were. If he could be sure the Users were trustworthy, he would let them change his code. Neither was true, so he took no action. But he couldn’t make that choice, either: the filter would expire or give out, and nothing good could come of that.

If, if else, if else. All false. His code had to be changed, that much he knew, but who could he trust to change it? Before his fall-

_-collision-_

-into the Sea, he would have said Clu. Creator, Administrator, Safe. Never true, no longer true, irrelevant.

And not SamFlynn. And not another program, no matter the capabilities. If only he could-

...change it himself.

But there was a way, wasn’t there? He would just need the knowledge, and the permission. If... the other User wasn’t an Admin, Rinzler would eat his discs. And better yet, unlike SamFlynn, he had no memories, adverse or otherwise, related to - say the name - to _Alan_1_ , just the hard-coded instinct to trust him.

It would have to be enough.

* * *

The first thing Rinzler did upon walking up to Alan_1, discs in hand, was stare mutely. The program that had been talking to the User had seen him approaching and left to speak with SamFlynn, in what Rinzler knew wasn’t a coincidence but ignored anyway. The Sea came up to investigate him and Rinzler let it sweep around his ankles, ignoring the warning pings of, _Virus, virus!_

The User looked at him expectantly. “Yes? What do you need?”

Rinzler grimaced. He would have to speak; the chances of him communicating accurately otherwise were... not good. He felt an unfamiliar data set try to run itself near the end of that sentence and aborted the process, irritated.

Alan_1 was still patiently looking at him when Rinzler realized he hadn’t given an answer yet. He started, reverting to reflex, and automatically held out his discs to his User.

\-- _his_ User?

**My User. Creator, User, Safe. Mine.**

Gold-white took over his vision, in a haze so painful that for a moment, Rinzler only registered it as warm oblivion. He found himself kneeling, discs forgotten on the ground, his User beside him, saying something. There was nothing he could do that no part of him would object to. To submit to his User's will was to betray everything Clu had written; to give a command to any User, let alone his own, went contrary to the deepest parts of himself. Stripped of those two exclusive directives, what was he?

\-- but -- **_his_** User?

Rinzler sloshed around in the shallows, soaking himself and Alan_1. He grabbed onto his User's... wrist, probably, and made a high, breathless sound. The pain was sharper at the contact, not as all-encompassing, so Rinzler hung on grimly and used it to focus, and speak.

"Disable... filter. Let me - understand. Ch...ange nothing else." He paused, system straining, heaving in breath after breath automatically. "Let me--"

That was it. There was nothing more he could say. Rinzler let his head fall, too exhausted to even close his eyes against the sting of the Sea. Another wave rushed towards him, filling his nose and mouth. Blue sang in his vision, with a message he didn't have the energy to process. Alan_1 was speaking, and it was too much, too much to take in, too much to control. One way or the other - when he woke, he would not be fighting his own code.

Rinzler shut his eyes, and let the Sea drag him down to darkness.

\---

_Light?_

A figure sank in voxels, drifting from deep blue down to black.

_Color?_

_Should that matter?_

**Yes,** said something faintly. It felt like an imperative, a command, and for a moment the figure struggled. **Fight!** The figure took a breath in memory, forgetting where it hung, suspended. The deep black took this as an invitation to help, to calm, to soothe. The Sea knew tides, knew breathing. The figure almost woke, but the black gave it a pattern, and it relaxed. In and out. Blue to black. A pause.

Code synchronized, and memory came. Not the overwhelming memory of the Outlands, but as though it were a dim signal across a chasm that he had not known how to interpret. Small moments, mostly. A few parts of conversations. And. One more.

_knew that, Effect Follows Cause and so_

And a kick to the chest. A collision. A fight.

The Sea ebbed further from him easily, to give him space enough to process. He barely noticed.

Old memory, long since cached and thought complete. His frame shuddered and he drew inward under the weight of it. Hundreds of Isos, some with massive holes in their core code, some in agony, some barely able to speak, some staring at him, some looking lost, a rare few calling out to the Users to save them; all nearly collapsed, all dying with one name on their lips. And he had heard, and Clu had heard, and he had looked at them blankly and there were wounds in them he had put them there he would never know which of them he had known before

before

before- before- before-

_He was hurt and alone and_

White hands and gold hands and - what was - was that - not pixels - not voxels-- 

**User.**

"I'm not a program! My name is SamFlynn!"

The Iso and the Creator. He had lost his discs deliberately. He had stopped at the threshold of the Outlands rather than pursue. He had _betrayed--_

He had **fought for--**

Memory faded, against the contradiction in code. He forced himself to relax out of his defensive curl, knowing he would do himself harm if he did not. More memories: of attacking programs mindlessly when startled, of the filter running too long unchecked and resulting in tension that left him mired in lag and running scripts at random. He let them assert themselves and cache in the right place. There was a trick to it, then. An override, anyway. Or it would get easier with time.

His own processor pinged him. The contradiction wasn’t being filed away quietly in the background anymore, not without the filter. He needed to resolve it. It would be so easy, to let himself slip one way or the other. Blue or gold. Almost without thought. Without responsibility. But here he could not see the color of his own circuits, and he would not give up this chance to choose.

The Sea waited a breath, as though the tide had only just begun to turn, then crept back, like fingers to an infected wound. Drew him further into the deep, provided - pressure.

_Who am I?_

**Tron,** the answer came. But-

_Rinzler,_ came almost immediately after. It felt more familiar, but not quite....

Memory, the Sea prompted. Thought and memory.

_"I'm sorry. You must be very confused. Do you remember what happened?"_

White hands and gold hands. Had the Users betrayed him, before that? And there must have been a before, though his earliest chronological memory was of waking and learning a purpose. Clu had not written him. Admin though he was, he could never have convincingly mimicked that blue.

Clu hadn't written him. Clu had patched him, clumsily and selfishly, and had-

Clu had lied. Clu had betrayed him.

_"Your name? Your function? ...You are Rinzler. You fight."_

Was he Tron, then? The directive was his, was in him. Clu had destroyed what he could, but that was too deep. Only Alan_1 could have touched that.

The Sea pulsed slowly, blue to black.

But no. He knew what Tron was like, he knew what Tron was to the Users, and he - couldn't be that. Wasn't that. Tron's circuits were blue, and Rinzler had....

Isos. They had been called Isomorphic Algorithms. He had not known their names. He had watched a shining tower fall, he had derezzed those he was meant to protect. No amount of recoding or patching could wipe that from his disc, not until and unless he derezzed himself in the process.

A pause. The figure stilled for a moment. He had not considered deresolution before; more accurately, he had, but only as an unfavorable outcome, not as an option in and of itself. And why would he have? How? Deresolution was a matter left to Users - or it had been.

Flynn had known him. Memory, with an immediacy newly written to disc.

The lightjet battle. Flynn had looked at him, his mouth had moved, he had seemed... disappointed? Stricken? Resigned. Flynn had looked at him, and Flynn had seen him, and Flynn had done... nothing.

He had heard the Isos.

The Sea pulsed slowly, black to blue.

Whatever choices he had left to the will of the Users, he would not leave them there now. If it came to be that he harmed the Grid, Tron would derezz him; if it came to be that he could have helped, and instead did nothing, he would derezz himself. A stay in judgement, at least.

It felt good to have decided something, but none of that did anything about his continuing dilemma. Any program could distinguish between options, given proper parameters, but to choose an entirely new path for oneself? To define one's own parameters?

He was aware of a gap in his processing, similar to the previous gap in his accessible memory. He had the capacity to _decide_ on, to _fixate_ on, his own agency, but nothing in his code let him do anything with that decision. It would have to be in two stages, then. First, rewriting his own code, on the technicality that since his User had allowed it, it must therefore satisfy his directive, whether or not he could see the connection. Then, with that framework in mind, he could--

Again, the familiar gap. He didn’t force it. He let the Sea breathe for him, and didn't choke.

He would be Rinzler, then. The City's name was Tron.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Detailed trigger warning: Rinzler briefly considers derezzing himself when he learns that Clu forced him to kill hundreds of Isos, blaming himself for their deaths. He decides against it, nominally because he sees himself as more useful to the Grid alive than dead. This sequence is presented as dispassionate and logical. If you would like to skip it, stop reading at "Tron's circuits were blue, and Rinzler had..." and start again at "It felt good to have decided something."
> 
> Hey, everyone. So, I've been absent for a lot of reasons, including mental health issues. I'm doing better than I have been, but I probably still won't be super active going forward. On the other hand, I'm not dead and I haven't abandoned this fic.
> 
> Speaking of this fic, I'm not super impressed with this chapter myself, so if you aren't either I don't blame you. I posted it mostly because a) y'all have waited long enough, and if you're still reading this, oh my god, I cannot thank you enough for your patience, and b) I'm pretty much 90% sure that I'm going to revise the whole thing after it's all posted, because dear lord it's been, what, four years or something from the moment I actually started outlining, and I didn't actually have an end point until about halfway through, and consequently I've improved as a writer and want to make it better. TLDR: I may as well stop agonizing over this part when I'm probably going to change it anyway.
> 
> However, the part of the above that is relevant to you, Dear Reader, is that I am looking for an eventual beta who can help me in turning this fic into something you'd like to have dinner with. If you have always yearned for an opportunity to tell me exactly where I've gone wrong all these years, now is your time to shine! (Well, sort of - I am actually looking for concrit, not just crit.) I am but a poor rock farmer, but I can pay you in terrible puns, internet cookies, and a truly ridiculous level of thought put into this rather silly series of movies. PM me if you're interested and we'll chat.


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